Do Clothes Make The Playwright?

Esther Mills, a black seamstress in 1905 New York, quietly touches the back of the collar of a Hasidic Jewish merchant who's showing her some fabric. This brief contact exemplifies the desperate longing for connection of the characters in Lynn Nottage's award-winning play Intimate Apparel.

Esther creates corsets for clients as varied as a society woman and a ragtime-playing prostitute, and she listens as they voice their desires for different lives. The 35-year-old virgin has longings of her own, but few illusions about her marriage prospects. She realizes that the mutual attraction with the fabric merchant is not going anywhere, for racial and religious reasons. So when a worker on the Panama Canal begins a correspondence with her, she throws the weight of her dreams into that relationship. Their marriage begins a surprising series of events that spins all the characters in new directions.

Nottage's 2002 drama is the most-produced play of the 2005-06 season (not counting Dickens or Shakespeare), according to a Theatre Communications Group survey. The play will have its Florida premiere Saturday at GableStage.

Nottage, a graduate of Brown University and the Yale School of Drama, is part of a wave of women playwrights whose works are increasingly being produced around the country. Gracing the cover of the American Theatre magazine that contained the survey were Nottage, playwright Theresa Rebeck and Sarah Ruhl, whose play The Clean House was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. Women occupy five of the top six slots on the TCG list. Joining Nottage are Regina Taylor (Crowns), Bryony Lavery (Frozen), Caryl Churchill (A Number) and Rebeck (Bad Dates).

With Intimate Apparel involving undergarments, Crowns dealing with black women and their hats, and Bad Dates about a single woman with a great love of shoes, one wonders: What is it with women playwrights writing about things women wear?

"Women spend a great a deal of time in their relationship to clothing; it's one of the byproducts of our culture. There is as much pressure on women today as there was in the Victorian age to present themselves in a certain way," Nottage says by phone from Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband and daughter. She points out the popularity of face-lifts and liposuction. "Women remain corseted today, but the tools are different."

But the women on the list are taking unflinching looks at harder-edged subjects as well. Frozen deals with child abuse and murder; A Number examines the ethical and psychological ramifications of cloning.

"They were picked up by the regional theaters and became hits [there]," she says. "I do think the situation is changing, and I think the regional theater is going to be at the forefront of this change. New York has to catch up."

The situation is even worse for black women, says Nottage: "I won't mince words. I believe Intimate Apparel, which had a sold-out run in New York City, did not have a commercial production because it has an African-American woman as the protagonist. Producers are still reluctant to allow us to stand center stage unless we're making them laugh or singing the blues."

However, she adds, "I think it's important to register the strides that women writers have made in theater over the last few years."

For one thing, women are writing plays in large numbers. Nottage, who sat on a number of panels last year, says she read "probably 500" plays, the majority of which were written by women. "There's a willfulness in the way American women are writing," she says. "They're saying, `By God, we have stories to tell, and you're going to pay attention to them.'"

Nottage adds that she hopes the TCG list "does truly reflect a shift in the climate for female playwrights. But I don't want to celebrate prematurely, because there is still a great distance to be covered before we achieve equity on the American stage."

Wide appeal

Intimate Apparel is Nottage's most successful play so far. It has captivated audiences in top regional and off-Broadway theaters, and it has won five national awards, including best play from the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. Nottage also received a 2005 Guggenheim fellowship for playwriting.

Nottage based Intimate Apparel on the story of her great-grandmother, Ethel Boyce, who came alone to New York from Barbados in 1902, had a correspondence with a Panama Canal worker and married him.